After Macquarie: Conserving Heritage Places: Clarendon, Tasmania, 2010

GROWING UP IN A COLONIAL HOUSE

Mary Ramsay

Thank you to Donald Ellsmore for putting my name forward to speak on this topic. When he suggested it he little knew the pleasure it would give to so many people nor the mirth it would cause. I first started thinking of catchy titles for the talk such as “Chilblains and chamber-pots” and “Drips and drainage” and “A Good bush carpenter”. I took these thoughts to a group of my friends who made many more suggestions and laughed a lot – all except one member of the group who looked at me very seriously and said “Mary, you will be positive won’t you?” This remark pulled me up. I realised that my positive friend was the only person in the group of 6 women who had chosen to live in an old heritage listed house – the other five of us lived in a listed house because we were all farmers’ wives and that is where many Tasmanian farmers’ wives live. My positive friend has renovated her home very carefully, seeking expert advice and she knows about the Burra Charter. Her home is one of Tasmania’s showplaces. One of our sons also asked me if I planned to be positive or negative so I told him “a bit of both”.

"Bowsden" yard, Jerico - 1948 (Author in foreground)

This is the great divide in Tasmania and perhaps this divide is world-wide – a divide between those who live in a listed home without having any choice in the matter and those who have consciously sought out and bought one. I come from the not by choice section. I live in one; I was brought up in another. I like living there but it is jolly hard work and very expensive to maintain and to bring up to current standards of comfort. I feel I have a duty as a responsible Tasmanian to look after and share this place but sometimes when faced with criticism from someone very superior about a lack of heritage correctness in my home I long for a sunny anonymous house. Because living in a colonial home is not my hobby or life choice I have other priorities that compete with any spare income. In some ways this is a good thing as radical changes are rarely made but it sometimes means that much needed repairs are put on the back burner or left for so long the repair deteriorates beyond being mended.

"Bowsden" - 1950's

I live at Ratho Bothwell because I am a farmer’s wife. In the midlands of Tasmania and in similar farming areas along this island’s major rivers like the Macquarie River or the Fingal Valley the history of land settlement has meant that many farming properties have a nineteenth century house, plus outbuildings of a similar age. These farm buildings were built of locally obtainable materials mostly sandstone or bricks made from local clay. Some of these buildings are listed and many more should be. For example neither Winton at Campbell Town nor Dennistoun at Bothwell are listed places. They both have a very long history of contributing to the Tasmanian pastoral industry - Winton through its role in the introduction and use of Saxon merino sheep and Dennistoun through Aberdeen Angus cattle, but in both cases the main house is not as old as the farm buildings and so they were left off National Trust lists and therefore not transferred to the Tasmania Heritage Council Register which consists mostly of places originally listed by the National Trust. Winton’s first pise house was not replaced until late in the nineteenth century and Dennistoun’s sandstone Georgian style house burnt down early in the twentieth century. At present I am turning over in my head the idea that all Tasmania’s buildings made from sandstone or hand-made bricks should be heritage listed. It is not likely to be a popular idea but the great stock of them is part of the reason why Tasmania is so special.

We now live at Ratho Bothwell. The neighbouring farms include Thorpe with its watermill, Nant with its watermill and mill buildings converted to a whisky distillery, Cluny and Meadsfield. All these are farms full of history and historic buildings. Norwood, another neighbor, which was granted to the Rowcroft brothers, has mainly wooden buildings because it was a secondary farm in the years when substantial stone buildings were being erected in Bothwell. Logan, now part of Ratho, but granted to Captain Sockett, one of the party that emigrated from Scotland on the Castle Forbes in 1821 lost all its abandoned buildings after the Second World War mainly due to floods and the needs of the towns people.

"Lunan" Devonport in 1950s, now McFie Manor

The house I grew up in was Bowsden at Jericho near the infrequently flowing Jordan River. The land was granted to Dr Francis Hudspeth who came from Bowsden in Northumberland. The house he built – the second house - the first was a cottage in the Orchard Paddock and is now an archaeological dig – the big house looks very like many hundreds of houses of similar pattern in northern England. It is a bit like a child’s drawing of a house with 4 main rooms and 5 little attic rooms plus a skillion at the rear. The house is built of brick and sandstone including the skillion which now houses the kitchen, bathroom and laundry. The verandah which runs around three sides of the building perhaps appears in an 1845 drawing by Elizabeth Hudspeth i. My first memory of that house is of standing in the kitchen and peering down into soil. The flagstones were being taken up and a wooden floor substituted. My mother had insisted on three things being done to the house when she took over as chatelaine and one was that the sandstone slabs had to go. Her mother-in-law had always put down sheets of newspaper to stand on when she stood on the flags to do messy work and my mother was having none of that nor of the permanently opened kitchen window, kept open so that the hot water pipe could reach the kitchen sink. She also insisted on fly wire on all the windows and doors.

"Lunan" Devonport - 2090

My grandfather Charles Burbury was one of the 13 children of William Burbury of Inglewood Andover – to the east of Oatlands. All William’s 13 children, eight sons and five daughters, went onto the land (as we term it) as farmers or farmers’ wives except one and she married an agricultural educator. None of them would have described themselves as farmers – my father was very insistent that he was a grazier and far superior to a farmer but the term grazier and the social distinction seems to have disappeared from the language and lifestyle now. One of the precepts in the Burbury family was that the farm came before the house, the farm came first. It was the land that was important and the house was very much a secondary consideration. As an example Sydney Burbury and family moved from Fonthill, which has a very smart sandstone house to Glen Morey at Woodbury to a weatherboard house but a far superior farming property. Charles Burbury bought Bowsden in 1928. By the end of the Second World War it had mains electricity, a septic tank system, a telephone and an internal bathroom.

Although it could be considered that I was born into a comfortable middle class family (not the fashionable class now into which to be born) both sides of my family had been affected by the big recession of the 1890s and the effects were still being felt then and have come down into our generation but it would appear not into the next one. There was a strong belief in thrift, saving money, making do and not getting into the hands of the banks. Bowsden therefore in the 1940s and 1950s had linoleum covered floors and very little furniture. Our first fitted carpets were handed down from my maternal grandparents who lived in a Victorian two storeyed brick house in Devonport now a bed & breakfast called McFie Manor.

"Ratho" front

Most of our neighbours and friends lived in similar houses – we had, in the Jericho district, farms still well known both in the history of Tasmania and in the farming community such as Northumbria, Park Farm, Huntworth, Ellesmere, Sandhill & Rosehill - all with houses featured in accounts of Tasmania’s historic houses. When I was young I thought these houses were far superior to all others. However when I think back I realize what a drudge it was for the women to manage such places with very little domestic help as well as their work as a farmer’s wife. Keeping the house warm involved open fires and cleaning hearths and making sure there was plenty of kindling and that the wood had been chopped.

"Ratho" east and front

In the 1950s came the wool boom when wool for a short time was “ a pound a pound”. That boom meant more money was available for home improvements. After a great deal of lobbying from neighbours my father grudgingly consented in 1956 to getting the kitchen and bathroom updated at Bowsden. In the kitchen after that we had laminex topped fitted benches and overhead cupboards, an exhaust fan above the stove and randomly patterned coloured linoleum tiles on the floor. The kitchen worktable, by then painted bright red and with 3 drawers, was retained and is still in place – it has been there for over 80 years now. Only a year or two ago someone pointed out to my sister-in-law that this work table is actually the bottom half of a big old pine kitchen dresser. So familiar has everyone been with it over the years no one really looked at it. [The top has never been sighted].

"Ratho" eastern side

I am telling you all this in great detail because the lifestyle was replicated among most Tasmanian farming families – thrift, making do, putting the needs of the farm before the house.

Any repairs or alterations to the house were carried out by local tradesmen with their varying degrees of skill and knowledge. We all slept upstairs in the 5 attic rooms and for many years there was only one power point up there. It was in my parents’ bedroom. On cold frosty mornings we all huddled in there around a little fan radiator to get dressed. I had a reading light above my bed – clipped on to the bed head and running from some device that went into the electric light socket in the centre of the ceiling. At some stage there must have been a major re-wiring but I cannot recall it. I think my father had done much of the early wiring of the house and he had put all the light switches in upside down. I hope you are getting the idea of a colonial home that was gradually adapted for comfort.

"Ratho" chook house pre-1827

After I was married I lived on a farm at Sorell that had been granted to a member of the “Calcutta” party - Private Thomas Pennington had been part of Governor Collins’ first settlement at Hobart. The house at Sunnyside had burnt down a few years before and a modern home had been built on the site using the old hand-made bricks. The old cellar was still in place and it filled with water whenever we had a big rain which wasn’t often, being at Sorell. When we decided to sell up and look for a bigger more productive property elsewhere one of my city friends said to me in horror “But how can you bear to leave your lovely house?” This remark became a quotable quote in our household for some time after that.

We spent some years farming at Bridport. We lived in an old weatherboard farm-house onto which we added a sunny living room and kitchen looking out towards Bass Strait. Recently I realized that if the new Cultural Heritage Act ever gets passed by Parliament and enacted, and the Acts’ provisions are then adequately funded to make it workable, this house at Umtali Bridport would meet at least two of the criteria for local heritage listing.

"Ratho" column detail

After 7 years living in what we thought of as “our” house we moved to Bothwell where we had already bought a small farm with a group of heritage listed buildings on it – that is Grantham which is known for its unusual barn on steddle stones built on his farm by William North, one of the Wiltshire machine breakers sent out to Van Diemen’s Land. The old Grantham farmhouse is a ruin with potential. We did not live there but lived on and leased the adjacent property Ratho. My maternal grandfather Alexander Stenhouse had bought Ratho in 1936 from the grandson of the original settler Alexander Reid. The history of Ratho is well known through the Reid family letters, which have been reproduced in that seminal and multi-volumed work The Clyde Company papers edited by P L Brown ii. The Clyde Company papers tell the history of the Russell family who were early settlers in the Western District of Victoria. In most volumes of this work there are letters to and from the Reid family. The set is well annotated and it has been one of my most useful and reliable tools in my work as a local historian in the Bothwell area. The Ratho house also appears in books about early colonial houses because of its stone flagged colonnaded verandah with entablature – the columns being made of wood. Ratho is also known for its octagonally shaped chook house which is listed by Alexander Reid in improvements he had made to the farm in 1827 – possibly one of the oldest chook-houses still standing in Australia. Ratho is also known for having one of the oldest golf courses in the world outside the UK.

"Ratho" privit hedge problems

For fifty years in Stenhouse ownership the house was divided into two houses. The front was retained for the use of the family. The manager and his family lived in the rear portion. A green baize door divided the two and a kitchen, bathroom and sunroom were added to the front of the house. The house is described, I think by Clive Lucas, as having a Queen Anne front and a Mary Ann back. The three front rooms are large spaces and the back portion is made up of a series of small rooms.

My mother Barbara Burbury lived for 20 years in the front part of the house. She was a GP who spent about half the year doing medical locums. She used the money she made to repair Ratho and make it slightly more comfortable – I say “slightly” because she never got the heating right proclaiming that she would rather wear warm clothes than warm a whole room. She spent the afternoons in a long woollen skirt and woollen jumper huddled close to an open fire. She spent many hours cleaning all the cedar woodwork using steel wool and methylated spirits. She then oiled it with a mixture of pure turps, brown vinegar and raw linseed oil – which mixture I continue to apply about once a year. Over the years she also repaired the entablature and replaced the rotted wooden columns and other timbers. My grandfather had covered all the external walls in that pebbled stucco much favoured in the 1930s. She gradually had all this render removed and the stone re-pointed.

"Ratho" kitchen window and fireplace - 2090

Since we moved to Ratho the rear part of the house has gradually been updated at the rate of about one room every 2 years. Attic windows were added on the west wing. A previous tenant had installed off peak heaters. These are a tremendous help in keeping the chill out and we try not to think of the cost of running them. We also found that wood heaters are a boon especially in Bothwell where for some reason almost all fire-places smoke. There is still plenty more that could be done to the house especially in the lights and power points department but the thought of all that drilling and dust and mess and plastering makes me feel faint and I just haul out another extension cord. Owning an old house involves compromise regarding comfort.

"Ratho" kitchen bread oven

© Mary Ramsay 2010.

i. Information from Stephanie Burbury

ii. P L BROWN ed. Clyde Company papers. 7 vols. Melbourne, OUP, 1941-1971.